Gender is weird in the Doctor Who universe, but it should be a lot weirder. When Jodie Whittaker begins her long-anticipated tenure as the Thirteenth Doctor in the series reboot airing on BBC America this October, it will mark the first time in the iconic British serial’s history that its titular character will be played by a woman. Although the Doctor herself once said that Time Lords are “billions of years beyond your petty human obsession with gender,” only a handful have ever swapped binary genders. And while Doctor Who has featured plenty of sexually queer humans like Captain Jack Harkness, Bill Potts, and Jenny Flint, its roster of trans and gender-variant humans remains blank — with one puzzling exception. Her name is Lady Cassandra O'Brien.Δ17, and against all odds, she might be my favorite villain in Doctor Who.

Debuting in the 2005 episode “The End of the World,” the second after the series’ 15-year hiatus, Lady Cassandra is a most peculiar villain: a cartoonishly aristocratic self-proclaimed “last pure human” who has no body — only a brain in a jar and a tarp of skin stretched into a frame that must be constantly moisturized. More than 700 surgeries have lengthened Cassandra’s life by untold thousands of years, but their cost has driven her to crime, as she slaughters her fellow oligarchs in an attempt to stay alive and dainty.

Lady Cassandra is also transgender. Conversing briefly about Earth with the Doctor’s companion Rose Tyler (Billie Piper), Cassandra reflects on her childhood, “when [she] was a little boy.” At first glance, this line seems like a throwaway joke from showrunner and head writer Russell T. Davies, who has said Cassandra was intended as a satire on celebrity plastic surgery. Cassandra being assigned male at birth could be a simple transmisogynistic gag about the elaborate nature of her surgeries. But Piper’s quietly surprised reaction isn’t enough to sell the “joke,” and the whole thing becomes a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, severely underselling a landmark moment — Doctor Who’s first and thus far only canonically trans character.

If you’re a Who fan but didn’t know this detail about Lady Cassandra, you’re in good company. Most officially licensed publications and scholarly works, from DK Publishing’s Doctor Who Character Encyclopedia to Valerie Estelle Frankel’s Women in Doctor Who, make no mention of Cassandra being trans, and the only reason we know Davies himself didn’t forget is that he contributed her deadname and birthday (4.99/4763/A/15) to Justin Richards’ 2005 reference book Doctor Who: Monsters and Villains. Likewise, fans frequently forget this aspect of Cassandra’s identity or deny its validity outright, as evidenced by this Reddit thread, wherein users theorize that her claim is “another sign of her complete disconnect with humanity” and/or evidence of her “fluid relationship with the truth.” It’s a shame that the series’ first trans character is continually erased by both fans and official writers.

In fairness, if “The End of the World” were to stand on its own, I’d be less upset with this erasure. Although the episode is a fun, visually interesting murder mystery, and Wanamaker’s performance as Lady Cassandra is deliciously campy, the subtext Davies accidentally introduces by making Cassandra trans is distasteful to say the least. For starters, playing into the “deranged transsexual killer” trope was already dated in 2005; a murderous trans woman who kills to ensure her access to surgeries is awfully close to Bad Trans Character Bingo. Rose’s tirade against Cassandra is a similar dogwhistle — her insistence that Cassandra is only “lipstick and skin” and “anything human got chucked in the bin” bears a passing subtextual resemblance to trans-exclusionary feminists’ vitriol against “self-mutilating” trans surgeries. And of course, no trans character on genre TV would be complete without a gruesome on-camera (apparent) death, as the Doctor hoists Cassandra upon her own petard in the episode’s climax, forcing her to return to an overheated spaceship and causing her fragile skin to rip apart.

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We can better understand Lady Cassandra not simply as an incidental parody of transgender womanhood, but rather as a fractured mirror-image of medical transition itself.

Trans writer Michelle Coats took umbrage with Lady Cassandra’s portrayal several years ago, in one of the only critical analyses of the character’s transness to date. In her essay “Little Boxes Will Make You Angry” — originally written under a pseudonym, but Coats has expressed to me that she’d now like to be credited under her real name — Coats notes that Cassandra’s desire for surgery is “directly linked to her villainy” and that she’s “intentionally ‘othered’ from the rest of humanity,” concluding that “nothing positive...can be gained by having Cassandra being trans.” If Cassandra were cis, Coats opines, it “would completely eliminate anything offensive about her character.” I can’t necessarily disagree — everything Cassandra does in “The End of the World” is laden with gendered subtext, and none of it is complementary towards trans women.

Where Coats and I part ways is in our assessment of Lady Cassandra’s second and final appearance: “New Earth,” the Doctor Who season 2 premiere, wherein everything changes. When Rose and the Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) respond to a psychic distress call at a hospital, a patched-up Lady Cassandra takes advantage of the situation by stealing Rose’s body (and later, the Doctor’s as well). In the process, we learn a great deal more about Cassandra; in particular, she longs for the last time someone called her “beautiful,” an event centuries in the past. “After that,” Cassandra grumbles, “it all became...such hard work.”

Something clicked when I heard that from Cassandra’s eerie lips, and as “New Earth” wore on, I became more and more enchanted with what Cassandra represents as a trans person. Although Coats bristles at the image of Cassandra delighting in possessing the Doctor’s “male” body — “for a lot of us it’s our worst fear”, she writes — I look on her time spent in both the Doctor’s and Rose’s bodies as a reminder of what it’s like to be a three-dimensional person again after so long without organs or muscles. That spark lights a flame when Cassandra jumps into a disease-carrying zombie and realizes that none of the horde have ever been touched in their vat-grown lives. That loneliness and isolation is one Cassandra knows well, and it reconnects her with her emotions and empathy, enabling her to finally accept her own mortality. Struggling to hold her cloned host body together, she travels back in time to become the last person to tell herself she was beautiful in a quiet, moving conclusion.

When we digest all that, we can better understand Lady Cassandra not simply as an incidental parody of transgender womanhood, but rather as a fractured mirror-image of medical transition itself. Her defining traits are themselves integral to the transitioning process: in Cassandra, selfishness, obsession with personal standards of beauty, and need for validation are all warped and hyperbolized. The result is a character who may fit cisgender clichés of transness, but also one who is a uniquely trans antagonist. When I look at Cassandra, I’m mostly repelled, but there’s a part of me that envies how hairless her skin is, and wishes I could achieve that in some areas of my own body. If it took 700 electrolysis appointments, a few murders, and all of Lady Cass’s money to fry off all my hair from the lip down, would I do it? The most dysphoria-haunted parts of me say yes.

If Lady Cassandra represents our relentless, single-minded pursuit of beauty as trans women, and also our fear of rescinded validation, then she also represents the love and empathy we develop over the course of our transitions. Often, that empathy can be blunted by the traumas and offenses we experience along the way, but transitioning is often a profoundly healing experience that allows us to reinvent ourselves as better people than we were. Cassandra’s path in that direction was derailed for thousands of years, but she found her way back in the end, suggesting that even the most jaded, depressed, and traumatized trans woman is capable of feeling love for the world around her once more.

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It’s tempting to write her off as a clumsy character by a cis writer who didn’t put in the work necessary to make a fully fleshed-out (if you’ll pardon the expression) trans character, but Lady Cassandra feels like so much more to me. She’s every negative trait about transitioning that’s required to make it through, a reminder of what the road to Hell is paved with. But more than all that, she’s the fragile little girl at the core of me that just wants to be beautiful and seen, the part of me that lashes out and puts my problems ahead of others’. In her final moments of life, as she tells herself she’s beautiful before dying unaided by the wealthy snobs around her, I see Cassandra more deeply and intimately than any other Doctor Who villain.

Now, if only a “bitchy trampoline” wasn’t the only trans human on the show...

Samantha Riedel is a writer and editor whose work on transgender culture and politics has previously appeared in VICE, Bitch Magazine, and The Establishment. She lives in Massachusetts, where she is presently at work on her first manuscript.

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